Neither Pure Nor Simple
by allegrafp
Summary: "Sherlock spends most of his time thinking, when he is alone. It's what he does. He rarely thinks about himself, though; he likes to believe that he has himself all figured out, self-diagnosed high-functioning sociopath, all he needs to know. But this A Lie and he knows it." A collection of Sherlock's thoughts in a rambling sort of fashion, along with the music that accompanies it
1. Part 1

**Disclaimer: I am not Moffat (not nearly so sadistic) nor Gatiss (not making nearly as frequent appearances on British television), so therefore I don't own Sherlock. Anything you recognize goes to them.**

"_The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - Oscar Wilde_

Sherlock spends most of his time thinking, when he is alone. It's what he does. He rarely thinks about himself, though; he likes to believe that he has himself all figured out, self-diagnosed high-functioning sociopath, all he needs to know. But this A Lie and he knows it, and sometimes thoughts of himself leak through his supposedly watertight persona. This happens, one night, when John is out with Jane, or Jennifer, or Jan, or whoever he's picked up this time. He feels oddly alone. Operative word being oddly. Being alone is good. He likes alone. But he feels wrong-footed and off and something is not right.

The alone train of thought shows promise, but he knows it's cheating, like a slant rhyme in the strictly ABAB rhyme scheme he prefers all his emotional analysis to take. He tries it on for size, though, for the sake of due process. _I wish I had some company_. No, that's definitely A Lie, too. So, he has a further idea of what the wrongness isn't, but he isn't very much closer to knowing what it is, exactly. He likes being able to name what is going on inside him. It makes him feel like he has some sort of control, and he welcomes the delusion.

This unnamed emotion makes him restless, though, pressing at his corners and urging him to take action. Of course, this is absurd - he can hardly take action if he doesn't know what the purpose of that action would be. Still, the insistent _move, move, move_ makes his fingers twitch and so he gets up and grabs his violin from the coffee table. The nagging subsides, at least, as he begins the careful process of tuning, and he lets his thoughts roam freely through the newly vacated space, paying them little mind. One stray, though, catches his interest: _The alliteration is horribly cloying._ This is nothing remarkable, just true with a lowercase t. John and Jane, John and Jan, it sounds like something out of a book for infants. But once he thinks it, he feels a small jolt of satisfaction that briefly eclipses the not-aloneness, which is odd. But it returns as suddenly as it set in, and, shrugging, he begins to play.

He plays bits and pieces of songs, from _Swan Lake_ to _Peter and the Wolf_ to _Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1_ to the Bach Double Concerto in D minor, never lingering for more than a few phrases. He is unsettled, and so is his music, flitting from composer to composer, piece to piece, searching blindly for something to express the hollow, insistent feeling that refuses to be leave him in peace. Tchaikovsky is too dramatic, Prokofiev too whimsical, Vaughan Williams too . . . sweeping, and Bach, well. The Bach had been a long shot. What is in him is dull and blunted, wavering on the edge of his consciousness like an old memory. Mendelssohn's Opus 30 No. 6, the Venetian Boat Song, almost fits. He can only play the melody - he hates the violin, sometimes, for being so limited - but the first two notes, the major dominant fifth surrounding them in his head, the E-sharp and the G-sharp in sequence strike almost the same note of pain in him. He knew there was a reason F-sharp minor was his favorite minor key. It has all the signs of something lacking, he realizes, but he can't think what. Everything he needs is right here at home with him.

_Home._ It's odd to think of the flat as such. He supposes the term had snuck up on him. John certainly used it enough. _Home._ He is done with the Mendelssohn, now. It failed to provide what he was looking for. On a whim, he switches to Mozart's third violin concerto. It doesn't suit, but it'll keep his hands busy, at least. Yes, somewhere in between cases and experiments and laughing and sulking and John and Mrs. Hudson and tea and milk "my flat" had become _safesanctuaryharborrefugewarmminehome._ This means something, he thinks. The last place he had called _home _must have been . . . _No. Don't be ridiculous,_ he thinks. But the Truth can't be denied. The last place he had called _home_ had been the country estate where he and Mycroft had grown up. Then, _home _had meant bright sunshine and manicured lawns and solitude and experiments and a world to explore and a brother who knew everything and he had been safe there, he thinks, and even happy a respectable portion of the time. He knew very few of the idiots in this world, after all. Then had come uni and its horrid dormitories, followed by a series of flats from which eviction was inevitable. Which had eventually brought him here, to 221B Baker Street, playing the wistful waltz from Dvorak's 8th Symphony.

He can't pinpoint when the metamorphosis from a series of numbers and letters to a safe feeling in his gut (_an irritating organ to have feeling things_, he thinks), so he's stuck without a distinct cause. He hates when that happens on a case, when he can't find a motive, something to make the crime make sense. There's this need in him to impose meaning on this meaningless world, order upon the chaos, but he is known to fail (well, he knows), even when applying that insistence upon significance to himself. John's advice would be to take it in stride. Accept it. He can't, though; he's not wired that way. He'll just wait for other avenues of data, a lost recollection, perhaps, and abandon vain speculation in the meantime. No use wasting brainpower.

John's always been good at that, taking things in stride. (The Bach Double comes back - this time he plays the secondo part, not the primo.) He'd accepted Sherlock's deduction skills instead of running screaming from him. He'd accepted the skull and severed head and eyeballs, to Sherlock's continued surprise. He'd even killed a man for him, that night, and he had accepted that role, too. That, and the role of sacrifice, that night at the pool.

Sherlock has yet to fathom these events, and, now that he thinks about it, the other times that someone has died by John's hand. Of course, someone's always been saved by John's hand - he's quite happy to be alive, thanks very much - but there's a weight to it. _John killed a man, the day we met, so that I might live. John killed a man so that Sarah wouldn't die. John would've burned with me so that we could take down Moriarty. John would've sacrificed himself so that I could escape with my life._

He doesn't know if he could do what John had done, thinking about , he knows that he would've blown the three of them to kingdom come, naturally, but he hardly could've let Moriarty walk away, could he have? Their inevitable death couldn't have been in vain. It had had very little to do with emotion or sentiment and everything to do with the fact that it was the only possible solution. What John had done, had offered to do, it meant something more. Sherlock knew that it must.

Idle wondering morphed quickly into morbid curiosity, arresting all his attention as he switched to some theme from a Doctor Who episode John had been watching last night. Horrible show, far too many plot holes and liberties taken with science, not to mention the inconsistency of the soundtrack, but he likes the lilting feel of what he'd heard. What would he do, if he and John were switched? This was too big of a question, so he broke it down into two discrete parts for further investigation.

Would he kill a man to save John's life? He doesn't know. He would definitely maim a man to save John. He wouldn't hesitate. But kill? Bach is better for this, so he reverts back. In the situation with the cabbie, he would have shot him in the leg, or maybe the arm, something that would have incapacitated him and given John enough time to get out of there. He decided not to think about what that said about John. In every real-life scenario he could come up with, he always found a way to save John without killing anyone. But that wasn't helpful. In a perfect experiment, where he could either kill a man, a bad one for the sake of believability, or John would die, he doesn't know if he could do it. The scientist in him tells him that it would depend on the means of the killing - checking a box, pressing a button, pulling a trigger. The rest of him knows that it hardly matters - it's a simple enough question. But he doesn't know. Deep down, a little voice whispers that he couldn't do it, and he likes that answer even less than not knowing.

So he moves on to the second part. Would he kill himself to save John's life? _Yes,_ he thinks, _in a heartbeat, yes_. John is important and good and everything that is right in this awful world where crimes are committed for no reason and people are forced to make impossible decisions. It is so much more important that John lives than that he lives. This doesn't make sense, logically, given, well, his intellect, but it is A Truth. The same little voice returns, telling him that he's not so sure he'd like to live in a world without a John in it. He acknowledges this, then moves on. It doesn't matter. John matters. Would he kill himself to save John's life? _Yes._ He has never been more sure of any Truth in his life.

**A/N: Hey all. This is my first foray into the Sherlock fandom (for writing, that is) and the first story I've written in a long time. If you liked it, thank The Book Sniffer. She and I made a blood oath to write 50,000 words of fanfiction over the next year. So check her work out! It's pretty good. I fixed her grammar. **

**As for this story, I hope you liked it. If you didn't, that's cool, too. Review both ways - I'd love to hear what you thought, especially if it means that my writing improves. There'll be Johnlock eventually, in a vague sort of way, so if that's not your thing, consider yourself warned. ALSO. I went on about music a lot up there. For those of you who had no idea what I was talking about, I have made a YouTube playlist (ooh, multimedia!): channel/UCUtpVmwACfkz43FbN-avrFg/videos?view=1&feature=guide. Hopefully it works fine, I'll make it completely public if it doesn't. Please don't stalk me.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	2. Intermezzo

**Disclaimer: No sudden windfall where I was miraculously gifted the rights to Sherlock in the past two days, I'm afraid. Still belongs to Moffat and Gatiss.**

He's playing the Can-Can at a snail's pace à la Saint-Saëns when John arrives home. "You could've been a musician," John says admiringly, hanging his coat up. Sherlock shrugs, which is more of an answer than the comment deserves. He _is _a musician. And it's hardly as impressive as his deductions are. Still, he's feeling generous - as soon as he heard the key turn in the lock downstairs, the hollowness started to abate. Now it's scarcely more than a memory, a lingering trace of what used to be there. He supposes that this means that it had to do with John. Correlation is not the same as causation, though; it is vital that he remember that in his line of work, and this is only the first experience with the the not-aloneness. That is, the first that he's noticed. One is nowhere near a pattern. This requires further observation at a later date, so he tables the thought, making a mental note to watch for any recurrences.

John coughs lightly, and Sherlock realizes with a start that he might be waiting for more of a response. Disappointing, that - he had thought that John understood by now his tendency not to mince words. But perhaps not, since all John says is, "Well, I'm for bed," before turning and heading towards the bathroom. The Can-Can _ritardando_s to a creeping _lento_, the exact opposite of what Offenbach wanted for his Galop Infernal. Something like a smile quirks at Sherlock's mouth as he thinks of the composer rolling in his grave. _Orpheus in the Underworld_ is a horribly dull rendition of a perfectly good story, yet somehow the tune became iconic - he deserves all the rolling in the world. Or underworld, as it were. As John walks past the living room again (would he appreciate the pun?), the melody creaks and stutters to an end. He pokes his head in. "Good night, Sherlock," he says quietly, intently, as if he actually wishes him a good night. Of course, John makes a point of saying that every night, for reasons that are as yet beyond Sherlock (_habit?_ he wonders), and he sounds like that each time, so it's probably just fatigue making his inflection sound funny. It can't actually have that Truth every night; that would be absurd. "Try and get some sleep, yeah?"

Sherlock rolls his eyes. Also absurd. "Good night, John," he replies. This is mostly the proper response, and it's honest, so that's what he gets. John smiles softly and then pads up the stairs to his room. When he can no longer hear footsteps, Sherlock begins to gently play the Berceuse from Fauré's _Dolly Suite_. He'd really rather play the Brahms, but John had laughed, weeks ago, when he'd tried that, saying that he wasn't some child who needed a lullaby to fall asleep. (Sherlock's response had been to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as loud as humanly possible - at two in the morning.) Still, John's knowledge of classical music is severely limited (clarinet in high school didn't do him much good, apparently), and his French is nowhere near good enough to know that _berceuse_ just means lullaby.

Besides, it isn't as though he's playing _for _John. Well, maybe that's A Lie, but if it is Sherlock ignores the fact and continues his defense. It's just relevant to the situation at hand, reflecting the quiet of the flat back upon itself. John just happens to be able to hear that process.

That had been something to get used to, when John had moved in, having someone listening to him practice. That hadn't happened, well, since uni, and even then only if he couldn't help it and needed to go over a run before rehearsal. He loves to perform, of course. He has always known this Truth about himself, ever since Mummy had held all of those private, salon-style recitals when he and Mycroft were younger, showing her talented boys off to all her friends. Mycroft had been uncomfortable, holding tight to his flute and looking out at the small audience as if they were about to send him to the gallows in an _auto-da-fé_and enjoy it, but Sherlock looked at them and smiled. He reveled in their hushed anticipation before he walked out, the attention fixed solely on him as he performed, and most of all the applause, the affirmation that yes, he was good at this.

Still, they only ever got to see the finished product, carefully polished and prepared for display. Practicing, on the other hand, was something intensely personal and private. He had taken great lengths to ensure that no one ever heard his mistakes, soundproofing his room completely at the age of seven. That was when he had tried to convince himself that he never made mistakes and found it too big of A Lie to swallow. Father had thrown a fit when he saw his renovations and had had them promptly removed, leaving Sherlock no choice but to stick a towel along the base of the doorway and hope that no one could hear his fallibility any more than they could see it.

When John moved in, all that changed. At first, he had tried to content himself with practicing whenever John went out, always packing up when he heard the key turn. But Sherlock did a lot more thinking than that, and John was _always there_, so that didn't last long. Then he had stuck to songs he already knew well. He knew a lot of pieces, so he had lasted quite a while, but after three months he was horribly bored again.

John didn't seem to show any such inhibitions when it came to making music. He sang "With A Little Help From My Friends" along with Ringo on the radio while doing the washing up. He hummed "London Calling" under his breath as he walked. The only time when he absolutely wouldn't make music was when Sherlock was playing. He even sang in the shower, for God's sake, which was the most echo-y place in the flat. When Sherlock informed him of the fact, adding that Mrs. Hudson could probably hear him, too, John had just grinned with the self-deprecating smile that was his default. "Does it bother you?" he had asked unexpectedly.

"No," he had replied after thinking it over, surprised by its Truth. "I just thought it might bother you."

"Why should it? I'm not singing for anyone, just for me. I mean, if it's a disturbance, I'll stop, but it's not like I'm ashamed or anything." There was a certain Truth in that answer, too. That week, Sherlock had bought a copy of Lalo's _Symphonie Espagnole_ that he'd been eyeing and set to learning it.

He plays it now, bored with the quiet repetitions of the _berceuse_. He spares a thought for John, presumably asleep now, and then decides that it doesn't matter. It's far from the first time he's played something loud at odd hours of the night. He has the piece as mastered as he ever will, and, looking down on the deserted street, he lets his fingers move of their own accord, enjoying the ease with which the brash runs come. It would be better with an orchestra, of course, but his imagination will have to do.

John is wrong. He couldn't have been a musician. He'd thought about it, after his pirate phase. Music had been middle school's sole redeeming factor. It was never dull, and he rarely had to talk to anybody if he didn't want to. For a while, it had seemed like the perfect career choice. But as he got better and better, his teacher kept pushing him to go deeper into the music, to try and understand the composer, to examine every detail and leave no note unturned. He couldn't do it. He'd always believed in the importance of details, but he couldn't bring himself to care about the exact length of an eighth note marked tenuto.

And so his dreams of becoming a member of the LSO had died out, almost as quickly as they had begun. He still played for fun, but the earnest devotion he had once given it had gone, relocated to chemistry, forensics, and above all, the science of deduction. That was the year that Carl Powers died, and Sherlock finally saw a way to make himself useful.

He wonders, as the piece _accelerandos_ towards its end, if that was the right decision. He probably could have done it, had he set his mind to it. By that same token, though, he also could have been a pirate. _Would John be a good first mate?_ he wonders. He suspects that the answer is a resounding _Yes. _ But he digresses - Mycroft would have shut down his efforts with a flick of his hand, and, satisfying as irritating Mycroft was, it was not worth the same amount of energy as his full-time job. Life wouldn't be nearly as exciting if he were a musician. It would be safer, too. It might be mundane, but he'd never been bored actually playing music. He might have been happy. _Still, I am happy with my life right now,_ he thinks, and is pleased to realize that this is entirely True. Looking back on it, after all these years, he can't imagine doing anything else.

**A/N: Here it is, the second installment. And it then follows that there is a second playlist: watch?v=Ba_kOUmlDME&list=PLXfPadeQkY5vRhTVYYiD7jZTTROi3j6PH**

**Many thanks to The Book Sniffer (again, check her stuff out - there's a cat called Schrodinger involved) and to HermioneGirl96, who was kind enough to beta this chapter for me. It sorely needed it, and she did an excellent job. Read her stories, too. There's no such thing as too much fanfiction, after all, and it's quality stuff. **


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